One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries

by Tehani Wessely, Marianne de Pierres

  “Seal him in,” said Ven.

  For the first time in eighteen years, she strapped on her red flight-suit, methodically checking her comms and data recorders. She paused at a twinge in her right thigh — her quadricep cables were thinning, and she hoped perhaps there’d be spares on Demeter.

  Preliminary sensors showed functioning environmental systems on Demeter, but there’d been no response to their hails. Ven stopped by the viewing chamber, unlocked now that Sol was secure. Demeter hung amidst the stars like a black and scarlet hive, studded with open claws that had once snared passing asteroids. The station was intact, and although scans showed no signs of life, they’d picked up odd energy fluctuations.

  “He’s trying to bypass the lock,” said Mike. “You sure you don’t want me to zap him?”

  “Just stay ahead of him,” said Ven.

  Ven passed by the rec room, and Sol stopped his frantic rewiring to pound at the porthole in the door.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sol desperately. “Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.”

  Ven kept her voice steady.

  “I’ll be back soon,” said Ven. “Don’t worry.”

  Sol saw her flight-suit, and what little colour remained in his face drained completely.

  “Mike, you can’t let her go,” said Sol. “The intruder defence systems could be active, we can’t verify the structural integrity of the interior.”

  The blue sine wave on the wall shifted uncomfortably, but said nothing.

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Ven.

  She forced herself to walk away, Sol still pounding at the door. Her earpiece clicked as Sol patched into her comms.

  “Let me out! Please don’t go! Ven!” His breathing was ragged, and Ven realised that Sol was crying.

  Her footsteps faltered, and Sol’s voice dropped to a small whisper in her ear.

  “Please don’t leave me…”

  Ven stood motionless. There were choices in life that required judgement, the weighing of necessary evils, of greater goods. Ven had not been programmed with wisdom, and had no way of assessing the psychological damage that would be caused to Sol by leaving him here, versus the physical danger he would be exposed to on Demeter.

  How do you measure a broken heart, Doctor Josh had asked her one night. He enjoyed asking her odd questions, and never seemed to mind that she didn’t understand them. But that night, he’d laughed wonderfully at her response, kissing her on the forehead.

  By mending it, she’d said.

  Ven tapped the panel beside the rec room, and the door hushed open. Sol staggered out and wrapped his arms around Ven, so tightly she worried that her ribs might bend. She patted him gently on the back.

  “We’ll go together,” said Ven.

  So hand in hand, Ven and Sol stepped onto Demeter.

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  Demeter was a deserted city. Empty schoolrooms waited with rows of silent consoles. Traffic lights cycled slowly, red and green, down desolate transport corridors. Ven and Sol had little trouble locating the supply bays, still neatly stacked with decades’ worth of synthesiser packs — carbon, iron, lysine. Unfortunately, there were no spare copolymer cables to be found. Demeter had set sail over fifty years ago, before the Eve algorithm awoke a new generation of artificial intelligence, and emphatically euthanased the Turing Test. The only robots here were stout, mechanical droids, with clamps and soldering irons instead of hands.

  Demeter had supported a population of almost five thousand, but there were no bodies. No scorched catwalks, no twisted wreckage. Not like the annihilated stations they’d passed before, not like Earth and all her satellites.

  By the time Earth’s devastated population had fallen to six hundred million, they’d descended into a war — not a war in which there’d be no true victors, but a war in which there’d be no survivors. In the end, it was the Army of Souls who had pushed the button — after all, God would welcome his own. And the androids, well, the joke was on them.

  “Mike, tapping you into the system now,” said Ven, plugging Mike’s transmitter into an active console. The blue light on the device blinked rapidly as he accessed the station logs.

  “The first casualties occurred here on the same day as the Pacific Hub — Day Zero,” said Mike, crackling through Ven’s earpiece. “Captain Tahira put Demeter under quarantine protocols… After each wave of deaths, they disposed of the bodies, and closed off more of the station, and…” Mike paused. “They just kept on living until there was no one left.”

  They hadn’t panicked, or descended into anarchy. It had been a calm and dignified extinction, here amongst the stars.

  “Because they had no androids,” said Ven quietly.

  Sol shook his head.

  “Humans were wiping themselves out long before androids awoke,” said Sol. “Almost everyone on Demeter was born out here, with no sky, no sea, nothing but the people who matter, and a profound sense of how marvellously insignificant you are.”

  Here, at the edge of the map, they had marched proudly into the silence. Ven’s gaze traced the population chart as it dwindled, plunge after plunge. She froze as she reached the end of the graph.

  “Sol, go back to the ship,” said Ven. “Now.”

  Without another word, Ven sprinted down the corridor, past brightly lit habitation decks, through looming transit archways, and into a wide tunnel of neatly labelled doors.

  “Ven, you’re almost on top of the energy fluctuations.” Mike’s voice was barely discernible through the static. “You’d better head back.”

  Ven slowed, her gaze sweeping the numbers on each door.

  “According to the sensor report, the last survivor died eight months ago,” said Ven.

  “Maybe she was immune, like Sol. And she slipped in the bathtub.”

  “Or maybe Sol’s not immune,” said Ven, stopping at a door labelled ‘Research Pod 482: Mora Sevell’.

  The pod bore an uneasy resemblance to the medibay on the Morning Star, the walls plastered with images of rotating strands of DNA, the benches overflowing with holographic cells. The one striking difference was the male corpse on the biobed. Fit, darkly tan, and apparently preserved by the energy field curved over the bed. This was not, however, Mora Sevell.

  A pair of boots protruding from behind the crowded bench turned out to belong to Sevell. A silver-haired woman in her early fifties, still dressed in her lab coat, and decomposing very slowly in the sterile environment. She’d literally died at the microscope. Ven peered down the eyepiece, but she may as well have been looking at a piece of abstract art.

  “She must have found something,” said Ven, straightening up. “She was making the same connections. If only—”

  Her words died in her throat. The corpse was gone from the biobed. Ven slapped her data cuff.

  “Sol! Tell me you’re back on the Morning Star,” barked Ven.

  The door to the lab burst open, and Sol rushed inside.

  “What happened?” he panted, taking in the obsessive decor.

  There was a barely perceptible blup, and the corpse reappeared on the biobed. Sol immediately had a strange, grey device in his hand, aimed at the corpse. After a wary pause, during which the corpse showed no inclination to unnatural activity, Sol holstered the shaver-shaped device.

  “We need to get out of here,” said Sol.

  “Keep the engines running,” said Ven. “I have to see what—”

  The corpse abruptly flickered out of existence again.

  “Experimental equals unstable,” said Sol firmly. “And I’m pretty sure that corpse isn’t supposed to be doing that.”

  Ven hadn’t wanted Sol to see this, but Sevell had clearly discovered something crucial, if disquieting. All Ven had to do was figure out what it meant.

  “Sol, when Doctor Gillian found you—” began Ven.

  She wasn’t entirely sure what happened next, only that the world swung dramatically, and the floor cracked against her head.

  “
Ven!” said Sol.

  “I’m fine,” she tried to say, but a strange crackling noise came from her mouth instead. She tried to get up, but her leg was twisted at an odd angle.

  “Don’t move,” said Sol, his voice tinny and distant. “You’ve hurt your leg.”

  Ven’s right leg was flooding her with malfunction alerts, but that wasn’t her biggest problem. She touched the back of her head, and felt a gap where her panel had smashed off.

  Ven tried to swear, but only emitted a feeble beep.

  Her vision flickered, and went blank.

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  She stood upon the twilight sand, the ocean lapping at her feet. The salt breeze tingled on Ven’s skin, and Doctor Josh was by her side.

  “You forgot to leave me instructions,” said Ven.

  Doctor Josh smiled, warm and attentive.

  “You never needed instructions,” he said. “Listen.”

  Ven leaned in, and pressed her ear to his chest. She closed her eyes, and at first, she could only hear the watery lullaby of the ocean, but then, deep in his chest, where there should have been a heartbeat, she heard something like the plucking of a steel comb over a music box cylinder.

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  Ven woke in semi-darkness, a blanket drawn to her shoulders, a familiar ceiling above her. She was in her quarters on the Morning Star. Sol lay asleep near her feet, his hand curled around hers.

  “Bioharmonics,” said Ven feebly.

  A blue sine wave perked up by the door.

  “You realise you’re a bloody nuisance,” said Mike, trying to sound irritated.

  Sol jolted awake, and started fussing as Ven tried to sit up.

  “You had quite a fall,” said Sol.

  “It’s not just the DNA or the RNA or the gene expression,” said Ven. “It’s the frequency, the rhythm, the pitch of all your cellular functions. Your entire body is a bioharmonic symphony, and yours must be in a different key.”

  Sevell must have realised the answer lay in the interaction between genetic harmonics and time. If a person’s bioharmonics encountered a point in time that possessed conflicting features, they would behave like two frequencies cancelling each other out. The person’s bioharmonics would stop, time would simply hiccup and steamroller on. Sevell had tried to modify the bioharmonics of her test subject, and change his frequency on a molecular level. But instead, the entire body had started blinking in and out of the timeline.

  “We can discuss it later,” said Sol. “You need to recuperate.”

  Ven’s right leg felt slightly discorporate, and she concentrated on reconfiguring her software to incorporate the altered circuitry.

  “Sol fixed your leg,” said Mike.

  Ven paused. “How…?”

  “He stripped the copolymer cables from my left nacelle,” grumbled Mike. “I’m only half a ship now.”

  Schematics raced through Ven’s mind.

  “But the phase drive—”

  “We don’t need it,” said Sol.

  “I don’t need to walk,” protested Ven. “I can splint my leg and put a wheel on it. I’ve seen them do it with goats.”

  “You’re not going to squeak around like some creepy goat,” said Mike. “You’re outvoted on this one, Captain.”

  Ven swallowed her response. If Sevell was right, Sol might not be immune from the chronogenetic pathology. He could be in a different key, but he might just be an octave higher, like Sevell herself. But if Mike and Sol were in agreement on something, she’d keep her peace for now.

  “When did you first realise I was an android?” said Ven.

  “Doctor Gillian told me,” said Sol.

  Ven smothered an internal groan.

  “All that time I spent pretending to eat was for nothing?”

  “I thought it was sweet,” said Sol, squeezing her hand.

  Ven stood up tentatively, and slowly shifted her weight onto both legs.

  “Thank you, Mike,” said Ven.

  She looked from the smooth blue sine to the gaunt young man, and understood how five thousand souls could so calmly face their end. It was never about how long you had, but how you spent it, and more importantly, who you spent it with. The Darwin was surely beyond their reach now, but perhaps that had never been the point.

  “Where to now?” said Ven.

  The sine wave took on a cocky slant.

  “I can’t jump with one nacelle,” said Mike. “But I can still hop.”

  And in a burst of fusion blue, they left the grave of Demeter behind them.

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  31 years after Day Zero

  4.2 billion light years from Earth

  The messages had stopped.

  They received the last pulsar telegraph from the Darwin three years ago, from deep within the Lemara Supercluster. The communiqué had indicated they were running low on supplies, but Hem was confident they were closing in on their destination. It had been date-stamped eighty-seven years ago.

  The Morning Star had continued on course, but Ven was beginning to wonder if perhaps Hem’s crew had succumbed to a fate more mundane than that which had claimed Earth.

  Her battery was down to three percent, and she was hibernating twenty hours per cycle now. She’d turned off her dreaming routine, and only switched on her cutaneous thermal systems when she performed Sol’s routine medicals. He looked a few years older than her now, perhaps thirty-two, and he’d grown into a lean and athletic figure. He’d never be particularly broad, but he’d recovered dramatically from the years of near starvation.

  Ven frequently forgot to schedule his checkups these days, and he performed most of them himself.

  Everyone’s forgetful sometimes, said Sol.

  But it wasn’t just absent-mindedness — every thought had become slower, and she seemed to occupy a smaller and smaller corner of her mind. As though the growing darkness were crowded with intangible, immovable clutter. It reminded her of a story, something to do with two brothers and a tower of decaying newspapers.

  Ven sat on the floor of the viewing chamber, scrolling through empty charts. There were no stars in the Xunek Void, save the occasional dying sun. If the Darwin had come this way, it wouldn’t have reached the other side. The silence on every channel was damning, and Ven let her data cuff fall to the floor. She’d led them to a graveyard, chasing a ship of fools.

  Ven stared into the darkness, her thoughts creaking ever slower. She blinked.

  “Mike, what’s that?” she said.

  “Dust,” said Mike. “We passed a small nickel-iron asteroid a while back.”

  “No, that,” said Ven, pointing to a tiny orb of darkness that seemed a slightly different shade. “Change your heading.”

  “There’s no way your puny eyes are better than my long range—”

  “Now!” snapped Ven.

  The Morning Star turned, and the blue sine wave on the wall increased in frequency.

  “I’ve just picked up a reading for something that wasn’t there a moment ago,” said Mike. “I think we—”

  The small, dark silhouette suddenly flashed, flooding the viewing chamber with a blinding green light before subsiding. Just metres beyond the pane of glass hung a metal sphere the size of a soccer ball, ringed with emerald light.

  “A shielded proximity beacon,” said Ven, and she ran to the bridge.

  She found Sol at the communications console, already poring over the transmission.

  “The Darwin?” said Ven.

  Sol nodded, moving aside to give her a closer view. The hologram was a jumble of squiggles and circuitry, swimming with symbols that seemed vaguely familiar. However, if she’d once known what they meant, they were lost to the crowding dark now.

  “Hmm,” said Ven, studying the schematic.

  “Co-ordinates,” said Mike. “And instructions for modifying the phase drive.”

  Ven traced her finger through the threads of light.

  “The key,” she said. “They found t
he door, and converted the phase drive into a key.”

  “I think I can make the modifications…” said Sol, his gaze moving methodically over the intricate hologram.

  Ven sensed his hesitation, and she looked down at her leg.

  “We only have one nacelle,” said Ven.

  The copolymer cable would be too worn to rethread into Mike’s engine.

  “I can do it with one,” said Mike.

  Sol was very still.

  “If we reduce the mass of the ship, it might work,” he said quietly.

  “It’ll work,” said Mike firmly.

  Ven glanced from Mike to Sol, feeling that she had missed something important.

  “Why don’t you get some rest?” said Sol gently. “I’ll have this working in no time.”

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  They pushed their bunks through the airlock. They detached the lockers from the walls, pried the panels from the bulkheads, and Sol tossed out all his clothes save the dark blue flight-suit he’d made years ago. Finally, they detached the module from beneath the Morning Star, and watched it sail away into the starless night.

  This would be their final jump. But instead of jumping out of phase, and then back in, they would jump out, and remain in the alternate dimension. This kind of thing had been tried before — Kiruchi Wen herself had conducted experiments using plants and small robots, but the general result had been ‘boom fizzle blat’. Ven hoped that Wen had fine-tuned this during her thirty year voyage.

  Ven woke without realising she’d fallen asleep. Sol was tucking a blanket around her shoulders.

  “Why do we still have a blanket?” said Ven blearily, trying to sit up on the floor of the cockpit. She glanced at her data cuff. “How long was I out?”

  Sol wrapped his arms around her, and lifted her into the pilot’s seat. He was trembling slightly.

  “Something wrong?” said Ven.

  Sol shook his head, and smiled, but there was something wrong with his smile. Ven tried to focus, but her processor was circling helplessly in its tiny speck of light.

  “The phase drive will burn out after the jump,” said Sol gently. “I’ve constructed an automated beacon, which will start transmitting as soon as you stabilise on the other side.”